Chomsky and the origins of AI research
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Melissa Heikkilä, "LeCun: 'Intelligence really is about learning'", Financial Times 1/2/2026:
(The AI pioneer on stepping down from Meta, the limits of large language models — and the launch of his new start-up)
LeCun’s lightbulb moment came as a student at the École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs en Électrotechnique et Électronique in Paris in the 1980s, when he read a book about a debate on nature versus nurture between the linguist Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, a psychologist. Chomsky argued that humans have an inbuilt capacity for language, while Piaget said there is some structure but most of it is learnt.
“I’m not gonna make friends saying this . . . ” he tells me, “but I was reading this and I thought everything that Chomsky . . . was saying could not possibly be true, [because] we learn everything. Intelligence really is about learning.”
AI research — or neural networks, as the technology was then called, which loosely mimic how the brain functions — was practically a dead field and considered taboo by the scientific community, after early iterations of the technology failed to impress. But LeCun sought out other researchers studying neural networks and found intellectual “soulmates” in the likes of Geoffrey Hinton, then a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon.
[You can't read the whole article at that link without a subscription, which I recommend despite its price. But as Kai von Fintel tells us in the comments, there's an open-access reprint at Ars Technica.]
For a sketch of Yann LeCun's opinions about current directions in AI research, see "AMI not AGI?", 8/2/2025.
And 1980's Yann seems to have fallen into the common error of seeing Noam as a proponent of epistemological nativism rather than rationalism, though Noam has often been misleading on this issue, including apparently in the debate with Piaget. See e.g.
"The Forever War", 2/20/2022
"Straw men and Bee Science", 6/4/2011
"JP versus FHC+CHF versus PU versus HCF", 8/25/2005
"Chomsky testifies in Kansas", 5/6/2005
The book that LeCun refers to is Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Ed., Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky — or presumably the French version Theories Du Language, Theories de L'apprentissage.
Philip Taylor said,
January 8, 2026 @ 6:59 am
A free, trial, subscription will also allow full access to the article — this is the route that I have just used in order to access it. But then if you're prepared to spend €434 on a lunch for two, the cost of a full subscription to the FT is barely going to cause a ripple in your bank balance …
Kai von Fintel said,
January 8, 2026 @ 7:24 am
The article is reprinted and freely readable at https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/computer-scientist-yann-lecun-intelligence-really-is-about-learning/.
David Marjanović said,
January 8, 2026 @ 7:31 am
Are you sure he isn't "Le Cun" with a space? I've never seen CamelCase names (of any origin) outside the US and maybe Canada; the Breton names with Le all have a space in France in my experience.
Did he simply change his mind on this issue, as he has on so many others?
Philip Taylor said,
January 8, 2026 @ 9:03 am
He may well have been born Yann Le Cun, David, but as far as the author of the article is concerned, he is [Yann] LeCun consistently throughout the article. He also self-identifies as such — see http://yann.lecun.com/.
Mark Liberman said,
January 8, 2026 @ 9:11 am
@David Marjnanović: "Are you sure he isn't "Le Cun" with a space? I've never seen CamelCase names (of any origin) outside the US and maybe Canada; the Breton names with Le all have a space in France in my experience."
His home page puts no space between the 'e' and the 'C'.
"Did [Chomsky] simply change his mind on this issue, as he has on so many others?"
As the linked pages document, his basic epistemological position has been pretty consistent — namely that no fundamental aspects of language are acquired from experience, either in the neurome or in the genome.
His suggestions about how language development nevertheless occurs have changed many times, starting with the half-serious 1965 suggestion of reincarnation, and on to the 1988 quote about a mysterious mutation or mysteriously emergent "physical laws applying to a brain of a certain degree of complexity".
J.W. Brewer said,
January 8, 2026 @ 9:47 am
I found the elaborate discussion of what was eaten and drunk during the conversation a bit odd, but I did appreciate the backstory detail that LeCun played the crumhorn in his youth.
Jerry Packard said,
January 8, 2026 @ 9:51 am
The Piaget-Chomsky debate is most interesting, but LeCun’s lightbulb moment is critically and – in my view fallaciously – based on the his assumption that “…we learn everything. Intelligence really is about learning.”
That Chomsky is correct in saying that humans have an inbuilt capacity for human language (as opposed to Piaget who believed that most of it is learned) is supported by the simple observation that, if placed in the environment where human language is being spoken, humans are the only organisms on earth that will learn human language.
Gokul Madhavan said,
January 8, 2026 @ 9:59 am
@J. W. Brewer: this is a standard feature of this genre of Financial Times interviews.
Philip Taylor said,
January 8, 2026 @ 10:19 am
Jerry — "if placed in the environment where human language is being spoken, humans are the only organisms on earth that will learn human language" — on what evidence do you base this claim ? If by "learn" you mean "learn to speak", then I would suggest that that may well simply be a matter of anatomy; if, however, you mean "learn to understand", then I would suggest that there are many counter-examples, the most commonplace being the abilitity of dogs and horses to follow spoken instructions ("sit", "bleiben", "die for England" (!), "whoah", "walk on" and so on); whether primates can learn to respond to spoken language using sign language is still a matter of debate, but I believe that they can.
Jerry Packard said,
January 8, 2026 @ 10:33 am
Philip, I like your argumentation but am nowhere even near convinced, as I feel your counterexamples are weak to say the least. Other species only understand and can produce mere snippets of humans’ vast linguistic capacity.
Chris Button said,
January 8, 2026 @ 11:45 am
I think Philip's point about anatomy is a good one. We became bipedal, which allowed for major shifts in the pharynx and larynx to enable complex articulations and hence "speech".
Philip Taylor said,
January 8, 2026 @ 11:46 am
With "can produce" I have no problem whatsoever, Jerry, but I am by no means convinced that they cannot understand us. When, for example, I tell my cat (who is sitting outside the back door) "stay there, and I'll get you some food", she does just that. And I think that dogs and horses, quite apart from primates, are far more intelligent that cats …
Jerry Packard said,
January 8, 2026 @ 2:07 pm
Of course they understand us. But that understanding stops way short of even the most rudimentary subject-verb-object sentence.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
January 8, 2026 @ 3:23 pm
Funnily enough, I bought the Piattelli-Palmarini whilst studying in France; a few years later, I picked up the English version London, at Dillons, for five quid – 'coz it was remaindered!. Working my way through Chomky's Aspects, I'd long reached the conclusion that his might be a nice theory of second language acquisition, but not very convincing otherwise. And then there was Fo[n]dor on his Auntie trip … different days – but the pop music was still (mostly) hand-made.
Rod Johnson said,
January 8, 2026 @ 4:32 pm
Relatedly, this article came out today: Dogs with a large vocabulary of object labels learn new labels by overhearing like 1.5-year-old infants. (NYT summary)
Chester Draws said,
January 8, 2026 @ 5:00 pm
Of course they understand us. But that understanding stops way short of even the most rudimentary subject-verb-object sentence.
As most of us who have travelled widely know, we can understand what a person is telling us without a single word in the local language. That angry policeman pointing at me is not saying "have a nice day".
Once you add a couple of words, it often becomes pretty obvious from context what is going on.
That animals can understand what we are telling them does not really imply that they understand our language. It merely means that they are intelligent.
Chris Button said,
January 8, 2026 @ 5:10 pm
Can't the further development of brain capacity for speech be put down to the physical development of our speech organs on account of us becoming bipedal?
In short, we develop the ability to produce complex utterances, and our brains develop accordingly to support this ability.
Nat J said,
January 8, 2026 @ 5:16 pm
My dog has a much easier time following my gestures than my verbal commands. I think what some animals are doing is following cues. I don't think that language can be equated to a complex system of cues. That leaves out all grammatical structure. Is there any reason to think any animals can understand grammar? They just know or learn that certain sounds indicate certain actions. That's probably why gestures are easier to follow for animals: no grammar to confuse them. So, I'm much more sympathetic to Jerry Packard.
That said, I'm not sure how good the argument is that "humans are the only organisms on earth that will learn human language". There are many skills that only humans can learn from their environment.
JPL said,
January 8, 2026 @ 5:36 pm
@ Philip:
I once had a dog that, while lying calmly next to me, became instantly fearful, and got up and looked around toward the neighbour's house when in conversation I used (probably with normal stress) a word that happened to be the name of the neighbour's dog that was always bullying him. I took from that that a dog is capable of noting the significance of some human speech sounds; he knew not only his own name, but the name of another dog. (He probably heard the name spoken most often not by me, but from the mouth of the neighbour, who was always calling his dog off, or calling him to come.)
JPL said,
January 8, 2026 @ 8:59 pm
If the problem underlying those addressed in the book "Theories du langage, theories de l' apprentissage" is to understand what the phenomenon of human language is and how it's possible, why all the focus on psychology, learning, the brain, neurology, genetics, etc., and nothing on speech communities, the speech actions of speakers, and the construction of norms for language systems? To take scientific knowledge as a subcategory of knowledge, it's obvious that it is, in its most important part, knowledge of the world. So how do language systems, which we use, in the Kantian fashion, to make sense of the world make effective and adaptive contact with the world? It can't be explained by focusing only on either "logical form" or "forms" in the sense of Bloomfieldian forms. I would think that even Chomsky ("Language is a system for the expression of thought.") would say, as Frege would, that it's thought that makes contact with the world. Thoughts don't belong to one person, as Wittgenstein taught us. So how does it all work?
If I were to try to capture the notion of "intelligence" in a single phrase, I might offer that the term 'intelligence' refers to the capacity of an organism for solving problems, and understanding the world is probably the most pressing problem for most organisms. And btw, I'd rather focus on the phenomenon of understanding (which, if it's functioning properly, should be increasing in adaptive effectiveness) as more basic than what people think of when they're talking about "knowledge". Understanding the world involves more than mathematics and formal logic; it involves things like the use of the category of causality, which necessarily involves tools for understanding the dependency structure of the world. It's not a question of "either-or". Acts of natural language use, as well as the activity of interpretation of perceptions, always involve both logical forms and reference to the world. We grasp the world and bring it into our understanding. (I hope what I said makes sense, because I wrote it in a bit of necessary haste.)
J.W. Brewer said,
January 8, 2026 @ 11:42 pm
I would be interested in hearing from those with relevant knowledge (including but not limited to myl) whether the article's claim that AI was in fact in the mid-EIghties "practically a dead field and considered taboo by the scientific community." LeCun is a bit older than me, and finished his Ph.D. in France the year I got my B.A. in the U.S., but the field wasn't so dead/taboo that he couldn't get himself hired by Bell Labs (alas approaching the end of its own lifespan …) to work on it.
As I may have mentioned before I took an undergraduate class on Artificial Intelligence (offered in the Computer Science department but aimed at non-majors; I may have gotten credit toward the linguistics major for it?) circa '86, and came away with a somewhat cynical view that the field was at the time overpromising and underdelivering, but also the sense that funders were still shoveling money at it. (The wikibio of the professor who taught it, now emeritized, talks about her work in "machine learning" rather than AI, but I don't know that that means much.)
ktschwarz said,
January 9, 2026 @ 12:00 am
"Practically a dead field" is an exaggeration, but the phrase "AI winter" appeared in the 80s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
JPL said,
January 9, 2026 @ 1:16 am
@J W Brewer:
"The wikibio of the professor who taught it, now emeritized, talks about her work in "machine learning" rather than AI, but I don't know that that means much."
Makes me think of Margaret Boden, an interesting figure in these debates in those years, who has not yet been mentioned, but whose writings might give you some insight concerning the anti-Chomskyan positions in that era.
Philip Taylor said,
January 9, 2026 @ 5:17 am
Jerry — "Of course they understand us. But that understanding stops way short of even the most rudimentary subject-verb-object sentence" — I think that I agree (but see later for a counter-example). However, when someone is speaking to me, how often do I analyse what they are saying in terms of "subject-verb-object" ? I would suggest, "almost never". Just as when I read a word on the printer page, I almost never consider the letters of which it is composed (unless one of them is blatantly wrong). Rather, in both cases, I immediately infer a meaning. And I believe that animals (well, some at least) do just then on hearing the spoken word. Not inately, of course, but having learned to do so during the course of their lifetime.
Now, my counter-example. Many years ago I shared a German-shepherd cross "Bassie" with my mother, and I would regularly take Bassie out for walks. If we were going somewhere suitable, I would often take a frisbee with me, which Bassie would willing fetch, both from land and from water. On one occasion, out walking with Bassie near Chislehurst ponds (without frisbee), a boy came up to me and said "Mister, can your dog get my frisbee ? It's gone in the pond and I can't get it". I replied (with perhaps more confidence than deserved) "Of course he can", and then said to Bassie "Bassie, go fetch the frisbee". Now he, like I, had no idea where the frisbee was, yet he immediately plunged into the water, swam around until he located the frisbee, seized it in his jaws and swam back to land. Now you (Jerry) ask me to accept that he could not parse "Bassie, go fetch the frisbee" into its constituent parts, and you may well be right, yet his behaviour suggested that he had "understood every word". What do you think ?